HP: Atonement
by stargazer84
Summary: Inspired by the novel by Ian Mcewan, and transformed to fit the HP world. Ginny witnesses a moment's flirtation between Hermione and Harry, but her rmisunderstanding brings about a crime that will change thier lives.


Disclaimer: This story was written for pure entertainment purposes for those who enjoyed the HP world as well as the world created by Ian Mcewan in _Atonement_. There isn't ANY copyright infringement intended.

A/N: This story, as you can tell will be partly AU. Although I am not setting it in the 1930's, there is still a wizarding war, Ginny will be slightly younger (3 years- making her 14) than Harry and Hermione (17 years), and it will contain some graphic descriptions later in the story. Don't worry I'll warn you. So go grab a cup of tea, sit back, and enjoy!

P.S. thanks to the HP lexicon when I needed to twist this story so that it fit into the HP world. Review, and tell me what you think!

Atonement

Part 1

1

The play- for which Ginny had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth from various boxes she found in her father's shed- was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss her mother's famous breakfast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her sister-in-law, who was traveling with her younger sister and younger cousins. There would be time for only one day of rehearsal before her brother arrived.  At some moments chilling, at other desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts spattergroit during an impetuous dash toward a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humor. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished healer- in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on "a windy sunlit day in spring."

Mrs. Weasley read the seven pages of _The Trials of Arabella _in her bedroom, at her bed, with the author's arms around her shoulder the whole while. Ginny studied her mother's face for every trace of shifting emotion, and Molly Weasley obliged with looks of alarm, snickers of glee and, at the end, grateful smiles and wise, affirming nods. She turned her head towards her daughter and said that the play was "stupendous," and that this word could be quoted on the poster which was to be placed by her makeshift ticket booth.

Ginny was hardly to know it then, but this was the project's highest point of fulfillment. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, when she burrowed in the delicious gloom of her bed, and made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Bill. In one, his big, good-natured face buckled in grief as Arabella sank on loneliness and despair. In another, there he was, cocktail in hand at some fashionable city watering hole, overheard boasting to a group of friends: Yes, my younger sister, Ginny Weasley the writer, you must surely have heard of her. In a third, he punched the air exultation as the final curtain fell, although there was no curtain, there was no possibility of a curtain. Her play was not for her sister-in-law's family, it was for her brother, to celebrate his return, and provoke his admiration.

She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her brother Ron's room was a skew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, and chocolate cards laying carelessly about, Ginny's was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model dragon's spread across a deep window ledge consisting of the unique lizards, but all facing one way, as if about to break into song. In fact, Ginny's was the only tidy upstairs room in the house. Her straight-backed dolls in their many roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instruction not to touch the walls; the various thumb sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table- unicorns, murtlaps, and pixies- suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen's army awaiting orders.

A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets: in her dresser, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept her diary locked by magic, and a notebook that was written that only she could read it. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back three years, to her tenth birthday when she began collecting: a small working model of a Cleansweep, a knut, a screaming yo-yo, and a gnome skull as light as a feather.

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries, and cryptographic spells could not conceal from Ginny the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. That was the job of her older twin brothers. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the gnome's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction, or rather; it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.

At the age of eleven she wrote her first story- a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folktales and lacking, she realized later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader's respect. But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the _she said_s, and the _and then_s, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being, Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all the fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show her mother, or father, when he was home.

Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Weasleys began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility of words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through the dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were "esoteric," a hoodlum caught stealing a muggle car wept in "shameless autoexculpation," and the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a "cursory" journey through the night. Ginny was encouraged to read her stories aloud in the sitting room and it surprised her parents and older brothers to hear their quiet girl perform so boldly, making big gestures with her free arm, arching her eyebrows as she did the voices, and looking up from the page for seconds at a time as she read in order to gaze into one face after another, unapologetically demanding her family's total attention as she cast her narrative spell.

Even without their attention and praise and obvious pleasure, Ginny could not have been held back from her writing. In any case, she was discovering, as had many writers before her, that not all recognition is helpful. The twin's enthusiasm, for example, seemed a little overstated, tainted with condescension perhaps, and intrusive too, her dear brothers wanted each bound story catalogued and placed on the sideboard in the sitting room. If this was supposed to be a joke, Ginny ignored it. She was on course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasure of miniaturization. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than the lives of the dolls in their mansion. The childhood of a spoiled wizard could be framed in half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically empathic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word- a _glance_. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so. A crisis in a heroine's life could be made to coincide with hailstones, gales and thunder, whereas nuptials were generally blessed with good light and soft breezes. A love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of housekeeping, the former being set aside for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until the final page.

The play that she had written for Bill's homecoming was her first excursion into drama, and she found the transition quite effortless. It was a relief not to write out the _she said_s, or describing the weather or the onset of spring or her heroine's face- beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow variation. _The Trials of Arabella _may have been a melodrama, but its author had yet to hear the term. The piece was intended to inspire not laughter, but terror, relief and instruction, in that order, and the innocent intensity with which Ginny set the project- the posters, tickets, sales booth- made her particularly vulnerable to failure. She could easily have welcomed Bill with another of her stories, but it was the news that her in-law's family was coming to stay that prompted this leap into a new form.

After a long Saturday morning wait, Ginny heard at last the faint pop of people apparating a short distance away from the house. She snatched up her pages and ran down the stairs, across the short hallway and out into the blinding light of midday, it was not insensitivity so much as a highly focused artistic ambition that caused her to shout to the dazed young visitors huddled together with their luggage.

"I've got your parts, all written out. First performance tomorrow! Rehearsals start in five minutes!"

Immediately, her mother and Hermione were there to interpose a blander timetable. The visitors- all four were fair-haired and striking- were shown to their rooms. Fleur, in Bill's old room, Gabrielle would be sharing with Ginny and Hermione, and their two younger cousin Jacques and Pierrot were placed in Percy's room. While Ron levitated their luggage, Molly gave the tour of the house and maintained a patter that surely robbed the guests of the ease it was supposed to confer. Ginny knew that if she had just traveled two hundred miles to a strange house, that bright questions and jokes aside, and being told in a hundred different ways that she was free to choose, would have oppressed her. It was not generally realized that what the guests wanted was to be left alone. However, the Delacours worked hard at pretending to be amused or liberated, and this boded well for _The Trials of Arabella: _This young blond trio had the knack of being what they were not, even though they barely resembled the characters they were to play. Before lunch Ginny slipped away to her empty bedroom and walked up and down the floorboards, considering her casting options.

It was not until five o'clock that afternoon that she was able to assemble her cast in her bedroom. She had arranged three stools in a row, while she herself sat upon her bed. The two boys had come with reluctance from the pond where they had been for three hours without a break. They were barefoot and wore towels over their trunks that dripped onto the floorboards. Their older cousin, who sat between them, with left leg balanced on right knee, was, by contrast, perfectly composed having liberally applied perfume and changed into a light blue frock that accentuated her eyes.  

Everyone was settled and the playwright was about to begin her little speech summarizing the plot and evoking the excitement of performing before an adult audience tomorrow evening in the sitting room. But it was Pierrot who spoke first.

"I 'ate plays and all that sort of thing."

"I 'ate them too, and dressing up." Jacques said.

Gabrielle looked away. Ginny said reasonably, "How can you hate plays?"

"Eez just showing off." Pierrot shrugged as he delivered this self-evident truth.

Ginny knew he had a point. This was precisely why she loved plays, or hers at least; everyone would adore her. Looking at the boys, under whose chairs water was pooling before spilling onto the floorboard cracks, she knew they could never understand her ambition. Forgiveness softened her tone.

"Do you think that Gulliver Pokeby was just showing off?"

Pierrot glanced across his cousin's lap toward Jacques. This warlock's name was faintly familiar, with its whiff of school and adult certainty, but the boys found their courage in each other.

"Everyone knows he was."

"Definitely."

When Gabrielle spoke, she turned first to Pierrot and halfway through her sentence swung round to finish on Jacques.

"You'll be in zis play, or you'll get a smack, and then I'll speak to zee Parents."

"If you smack us, _we'll_ speak to zee Parents."

That the threat had been negotiated neatly downward did not appear to diminish its power. Pierrot sucked on his lower lip.

"Pourquoi? Do we 'ave to?" Everything was conceded in the question, and Gabrielle tried to ruffle his hair.

"Remember what Fleur said? We're guests in zis house and we make ourselves? What?"

"Amendable," the boys chorused in misery, barely stumbling over the unusual word.

Gabrielle turned to Ginny and smiled. "Please, tell us about your play."

Ginny felt suddenly ashamed at what she had selfishly begun, for it had never occurred to her that they would not want to play their parts in her play. What was worse, Gabrielle had made it clear that she too would not be acting on sufferance. The vulnerable Delacours were being coerced. Avoiding Gabrielle's gaze the whole while, she proceeded to outline the plot, even as its stupidity began to overwhelm her. She no longer had the heart to invent for her young guests the thrill of the first night.

As soon as she was finished Pierrot said, "I want to be zee count. I want to be a bad person."

Jacques said simply, "I'm a prince. I'm always a prince."

She could have drawn them to her and kissed their little faces, but she said, "That's all right then."

Gabrielle uncrossed her legs, smoothed her dress and stood, as though about to leave. She spoke through a sigh of sadness or resignation. "I suppose that because you're zee one who wrote it, you'll be Arabella…"

"Oh no," said Ginny. "No. Not at all."

She said no, but she meant yes. Of course she was taking the part of Arabella. What she was objecting to was Gabrielle's "because." She was not playing Arabella because she wrote the play; she was taking the part because no other possibility had crossed her mind, because that was how Bill was to see her, because she _was_ Arabella.

But she had said no, and now Gabrielle was saying sweetly, "In zat case, do you mind if I play 'er? I zink I could do it very well. In fact, of zee two of us…"

She let that hang, and Ginny started at her, unable to keep the horror of her expression, and unable to speak. It was slipping away from her, she knew, but there was nothing that she could think of to say that would bring it back. Into Ginny's silence, Gabrielle pressed her advantage.

"I 'ad a long illness last 'ear, so I could do zat part of it well too."

Too? Ginny could not keep up with the young girl. The misery of the inevitable was clouding her thoughts.

One of the boys said proudly, "And you were in zat school play."

How could she tell them that Arabella was not French? Her skin was freckled and her hair was red and her thoughts were Ginny's thoughts. Gabrielle was reading her mind because she now played her final card, the unrefusable ace.

"Do say yes. It would be zee only good thing zat's 'appened to me in months."

Yes. Unable to push her tongue against the word, Ginny could only nod, and felt as she did so a sulky thrill of self-annihilating compliance spreading across her skin and ballooning outward from it, darkening the room in throbs. She wanted them to leave, she wanted to lie alone, facedown on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began.

Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details. Gabrielle had picked up the bundle of Ginny's manuscripts from the floor, and the boys had slipped from their chairs to follow their cousin in the center of her room that Ginny had cleared the day before. Did she dare leave now? Gabrielle was pacing the floorboards, one hand to her brow as she skimmed through the first pages of her play, muttering the lines from the prologue. She announced that nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning, and now she was casting her young cousins as Arabella's parents and describing the opening to them, seeming to know all there was to know about the scene. The advance of Gabrielle's dominion was merciless and made self-pity irrelevant. For Ginny had not even been cast as Arabella's mother, and now was surely the time to sidle from the room and tumble facedown onto the couch. But it was Gabrielle's briskness, her obliviousness to anything beyond her own business, and Ginny's certainty that her feelings would not even register, still less provoke guilt, which gave her the strength to resist.

She took the play from Gabrielle and said in a voice that was constricted and more high pitched than usual, "If you're Arabella, then I'll be the director, thank you very much, and I'll read the prologue."

Gabrielle put a fair hand to her mouth. "Excuse moi!" she hooted. "I was just trying to get zings started."

Ginny was unsure how to respond, so she turned to Pierrot and said, "You don't look much like Arabella's mother."

The reversal of Gabrielle's casting decision and the laughter in the boys it provoked, made for a shift in the balance of power. Gabrielle made and exaggerated shrug of her bony shoulders and went to stare out of the window. Perhaps she was struggling with the temptation to flounce from the room.

Though the boys started a wrestling match, and there cousin suspected the onset of a headache, somehow the rehearsal began. The silence into which Ginny read the prologue was tense.

                        This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella

                        Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.

                        It grieved her parents to see their firstborn

                        Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne

                        Without permission…

Ginny positioned her cast; she herself clutched Jacques' arm, Gabrielle and Pierrot stood several feet away, hand in hand. When the boys met each other's eye they had a giggling fit which the girls shushed at. There had been trouble enough already, But Ginny began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution only when Jacques began to read from his sheet in a stricken monotone, as though each word was a name on a list of dead people, and was unable to pronounce "inexperienced" even though it was said for him many times, and left out the last two words of his lines. As for Gabrielle, she spoke lines correctly and casually, and sometimes smiled inappropriately at some private thought, determined to demonstrate that her nearly adult mind was elsewhere.

And so they went on, for a full half an hour, steadily wrecking Ginny's creation, and it was mercy, therefore, when Hermione came to fetch the boys for their bath.

2

Partly because of her youth and the glory of the day, partly because of her blossoming need to finish a chapter in her book, Hermione Granger half ran with her flowers along the path that went by the pond, before curving away through the garden. The accumulated inactivity of the summer weeks since finals also hurried her along; since coming to the Burrow, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.

The cool high shade of the woods was a relief, the sculpted intricacies of the tree trunks were enchanting. Once through the hedges and past the rhododendrons, she crossed the open yard and came up just on the edge of the pond.

Her quickest way into the house was to cross the lawn, go around a portion of the lopsided house and into the kitchen. But her childhood friend, Harry Potter, was on his knees de-gnoming a portion of the garden, and she did not feel like getting into a conversation with him. Or at least, not now.

She refreshed the flowers by plunging them into the pond's deep, cool water and avoided Harry by hurrying around to the front of the house- it was an excuse, she thought, to stay outside for another few minutes. Morning sunlight, or any light, for that matter, could not conceal the uniqueness of the Weasely's home- barely forty years old, lopsided, held up by magic, to be condemned one day in an article by Skeeter, as a tragedy of wasted chances. Although if one turned one's back to the front yard, the view was fine enough, giving an impression of timeless, unchanging calm which made her more certain than ever that the war would be upon them.

She went inside, quickly crossed the short entryway- how familiar her echoing steps- and paused to catch her breath in the sitting room. Dripping coolly onto her sandaled feet, the untidy bunch of rosebay willow herb and irises brought her to a better state of mind. The vase she was looking for was on a table by the windows which were slightly ajar.

Hermione had returned from Hogwarts with a vague notion that the Weasley family was owed an uninterrupted stretch of her company. But Mr. Weasley remained at work, and Molly, when she wasn't nurturing a migraine, seemed distant, even unfriendly. Hermione had carried up trays of tea to her, thinking some intimate conversations might help. However, Molly Weasley wanted to share only tiny frets about the household, or she lay back against the pillows, her expression unreadable in the gloom, emptying her cup in silence. Ginny was lost to her writing fantasies- what had seemed a passing fad was now an enveloping obsession. Hermione had seen them on the stairs that morning, Ginny leading the young children, poor things, who had arrived only yesterday, up to her room to rehearse the play Ginny wanted to put on that evening, when Bill and his friend were expected. 

Hermione knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of the Burrow, lying on her guest bed, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading through her arm as she read her way through her _Defense Against the Dark Arts_ textbook. She could not remain here, she knew she had to make plans, but she did nothing. There were various possibilities, all equally impressing. She had a little money in her account, enough to keep her modestly for a year or so. Bill had invited her to spend time with him at the bank. Her professors were offering to help her find a job- a dull one certainly, but she would have her independence.

No one was holding Hermione back; no one would care particularly if she left. It wasn't torpor that kept her- she was often restless to a point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed. From time to time she persuaded herself that she remained for the Weasley's sake, or at least to help. In fact, the thought of packing her suitcase and catching the morning train did not excite her. Leaving for leaving's sake. Lingering here, bored and comfortable, was a form of self-punishment tinged with pleasure, or the expectation of it; if she went away something bad might happen or, worse, something good, something she could not afford to miss. And there was Harry, who exasperated her with his affectation of distance. They had known each other since they were eleven, she and Harry, and it bothered her that they were awkward when they talked. Even though she felt it was largely his fault. She knew that this was something she must clear up before she thought of leaving.

Through the open window came the scent of Magical Manure, always present except on the coldest days, and noticeable only to those who had been away. Harry threw one last gnome and sat on the dry grass.

She advanced into the room, and thrust the flowers into the vase. It had once belonged to Ron's Uncle Bilius. There was really no point trying to arrange wildflowers. They had tumbled into their own symmetry, and it was certainly true that too even a distribution between irises and the rosebay willow herb ruined the effect. She spent some minutes making adjustments in order to achieve a natural chaotic look. While she did so she wondered about going out to Harry. But she felt uncomfortable and hot, and would like to check her appearance in the mirror above the fireplace. But if he turned around- he was standing with his back to the house- he would see right into the room. At last she was finished and stood again. Now Bill's friend, Ambrosius Flume Jr., might believe that the flowers had simply been dropped in the vase in the same carefree spirit with which they had been picked. It made no sense, she knew, arranging the flowers before the water was in- but there it was; she couldn't resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone. Molly wanted flowers in the guest's room, and Hermione was happy to oblige. The place to go for water was the kitchen. But Mrs. Weasley was preparing to cook tonight's meal. And no one in the right state of mind entered the kitchen while Molly was cooking. It surely made more sense to go outside and fill the vase from the pond.

Once a friend of Mr. Weasley's had come to the house and examined the vase and declared it sound. It was genuine Meissen porcelain. Even though it was reckoned to be worth more than the other pieces in the Weasley home, which were mostly junk collected by Mr. Weasley, Arthur wanted the vase in use, in honor of Uncle Bilius' memory. It was not to be imprisoned behind a glass case. If it had survived the first Wizarding War, the reasoning went, then it could survive the Weasley's. His wife did not disagree. The truth was, whatever the great value, and beyond its association, Molly Weasley did not much like the vase.

Hermione gripped the cool porcelain in both hands as she stood on one foot, and with the other hooked the door wide open. As she stepped out into the brightness, the rising scent of warmed earth was like a friendly embrace. Two swallows were making passes over the pond. The flowers swung in the light breeze, tickling her face as she crossed the terrace and carefully negotiated the three crumbly steps down to the path. Harry turned suddenly at the sound of her approach.

"I was away in my thoughts." He began to explain.

"Beautiful day." She said through a sigh.

He walked along side her to the pond, silent for a while. He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had no knowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.

"How's your reading going?" He asked looking down at a passing patch of crab grass.

"Boring."

"You mustn't say so."

"I wish he would just get on with it."

"He does. And it gets better."

"I'd rather read Trimble any day." She said.

She felt she had said something stupid. Harry was looking away across the yard toward the wood that lined the river valley, the wood she had run through that morning. She liked his eyes, she thought, the unblended mix of brown and green, made even more irregular in the sunlight. And she liked the fact that he was so tall. It was an interesting combination in a man, intelligence and sheer bulk. 

"I know what you mean," he said as they walked the remaining few yards to the pond. "There's more feeling in Trimble, but he can be a bit crude compared to Slinkhard."

She set down the vase on the uneven ground at the edge of the pond. The last thing she wanted was a debate on elementary Defense Against the Dark Arts. She didn't think Trimble was cruse at all, or that Slinkhard was a good defensive writer, but she wasn't going to be drawn in, defending, defining, attacking. She was tired of all that, and Harry was tenacious in argument.

Instead she said, "Bill's coming today, did you know?"

"I heard a rumor that it would be this afternoon."

"He's bringing a friend, this man Ambrosius Flume Jr."

"The soon to be chocolate millionaire. Oh no! And you're bringing him flowers!"

She smiled. Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was? She no longer understood him. He changed the subject.

Mr. Weasley says you're going to be a Healer."

"I'm thinking about it."

"You must love the student life."

He looked away again, but this time for only a second or less, and when he turned to her she thought she saw a touch of irritation. She saw his eyes again, green and brown flecks, like a boy's marble. When she spoke she sounded as if she had seen nothing.

"How else do you become a Healer?"

"That's my point. Another four years. Why do it?"

She wasn't offended, and was taking his question seriously. "I don't want to teach, or work for the ministry. And medicine just interests me…"

She thought she was imagining it, but in fact she was right- there was something trying in Harry's manner lately. Two days before he had knocked on Ginny's bedroom door, in itself odd, seeing as the door was open. When she stood to face hi, he was standing in the hall asking in a loud, impersonal voice if he could borrow her charms book. Everything he did was designed to distance her. They went over to her desk together, and when he found the book, she asked him if he wanted to join her in the kitchen for a cup of tea. It was a pretense, his dithering refusal- he was one of the most confident people she ever met. She was being mocked, she knew. She went back to laying on her bed with her Defense Against the dark Arts book, and read without taking in a word, feeling irritation and confusion grow. She was being mocked, or she was being punished-she did not know which was worse. Punished for being the smartest in her class, mocked for taking an interest in Healing and not becoming an Auror.

Awkwardly, she picked up the vase and balanced it on a nearby stone. It would have made better sense to take the flowers out first, but she was too irritable. Her hands were hot and dry and she had to grip the porcelain all the tighter. Harry was silent, but she could tell from his expression that he regretted what he had said. That was no comfort either. This is what happened when they talked these days; one or the other always in the wrong, trying to call back the last remark. There was no ease, no stability in the course of their conversations, no chance to relax. Instead, it was spikes, traps, and awkward turns that caused her to dislike herself almost as much as she disliked him, though she did not doubt that he was mostly to blame. She hadn't changed, but there was no question that he had. He was putting distance between himself and the family that had been completely open to him and given him encouragement. If he wanted distance, then let him have it.

Her idea was to lean over the mud and hold the flowers in the vase while she lowered it on its side into the water, but it was at this point that Harry, wanting to make amends, tried to be helpful.

"Let me take that," he said, stretching out a hand. "I'll fill it for you, and you take the flowers."

"I can manage, thanks." She was already holding the vase over the mud.

But he said, "Look, I've got it." And he had, tightly between forefinger and thumb. "You'll get your pants dirty. Take the flowers."

This was a command on which he tried to confer urgent masculine authority. The effect on Hermione was to cause her to tighten her grip. She had no time, and certainly no inclination, to explain that plunging vase and flowers into the water would help with the natural look she wanted in the arrangement. She tightened her hold and twisted her body away from him. He was not so easily shaken off. With a sound like a dry twig snapping, a section of the lip of the vase came away in his hand, and split into two triangular pieces which flew into the water and tumbled into the bottom in a synchronous, seesawing motion, and lay there, several inches apart, writhing in the broken light.

Hermione and Harry froze in the attitude of their struggle. There eyes met, and what she saw in the bilious mélange of green and brown was not shock, or guilt, but a form of a challenge, or even triumph. She had the presence of mind to set the ruined vase back down on the ground before letting herself confront the significance of the accident. It was irresistible, she knew, even delicious, for the graver it was, the worse it would be for Harry.

"You idiot! Look what you've done."

He looked into the water, then he looked back at her, and simply shook his head as he raised a hand to cover his mouth. By this gesture he assumed full responsibility, but at the moment, she hated him for the inadequacy of the response. He glanced toward the pond and sighed. For a moment he thought she was about to step backward onto the vase, and he raised his hand and pointed, though he said nothing. Instead he began to unbutton his shirt. Immediately she knew what he was about. Intolerable. She kicked off her sandals, unbuttoned her blouse and removed it, unfastened her pants and stepped out of them and went to the edge of the pond. He stood with his hands on his hips and stared as she jumped into the water in her underwear. Denying his help, any possibility of making amends, was his punishment. The unexpectedly freezing water that caused her to gasp was his punishment. She held her breath, and sank, leaving her hair fanned out across the surface. Drowning herself would be his punishment.

When she emerged a few seconds later with a piece of pottery in each hand, he knew better than to offer her help out of the water. The frail white nymph, from whom water cascaded, carefully placed the pieces by the vase. She dressed quickly, turning her wet arms with difficulty through her sleeves, and tucking the unfastened blouse into her pants. She picked up her sandals and thrust them under her arm, put the fragments in the pocket of her pants, and took up the vase. Her movements were savage, and she would not meet his eye. He did not exist, he was banished, and this was also to be his punishment. He stood there dumbly as she walked away from him, barefoot across the lawn, and he watched her darkened hair swing heavily across her shoulders, drenching her shirt. Then he turned and looked into the water in case there was a piece she had missed. It was difficult to see because the roiling surface had yet to recover its tranquility, and the turbulence was driven by the lingering spirit of her fury. He put his hand flat upon the surface, as though to quell it. She, meanwhile, had disappeared into the house.


End file.
